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It rarely happens, but every now and then, a billionaire is told “no.”

This week the California Court of Appeals denied Broadcom billionaire Henry Nicholas‘ attempt to seal documents relating to his nasty eight-year long divorce.

“We reject Nicholas’s efforts to transform one of the initial trial judge’s prior sealing orders into a juridical black hole from which no light can ever escape,” writes Judge Richard M. Arison in his opinion.

Although many of the details have already been released, Nicholas has good reason not to want more of his dirty laundry aired in public. In court documents released briefly last year, Mrs. Nicholas alleged that her husband once threatened to have her “whacked.” She withdrew the claim later on, but she has also alleged that their children found cocaine in their home and that she once caught her husband with another woman in a Jacuzzi near their home. Nicholas has vehemently denied all accusations.

Still, this week’s defeat in court is minor compared to the legal troubles he was facing last year. Then, Nicholas was facing a potential lifetime in jail for 21 federal charges of options backdating and felony drug charges.

Sumner Redstone is apparently livid after a New York Post article published last month referred to his alleged penchant for “young girls.” The article claimed that Redstone, 87, had taken a special interest in a “scantily clad crew of six young singers” called Electric Barbarellas. The Post also reported that he aimed to make the group the subject of a new MTV show, but the band was apparently “so bad” that MTV CEO Judy McGrath said she was willing to quit over the show. The Post did note that MTV sources had denied the rumblings.

Even though the original reports came from The Daily Beast, Redstone is apparently furious at New York Post owner and fellow billionaire Rupert Murdoch. He has said he will seek revenge and is allegedly looking for legal ways to bring down Murdoch.

Murdoch representatives did not immediately return a call for comment. A representative for Redstone stated that “the perennial rumors about a rivalry with Mr. Murdoch are totally false and baseless and are no more accurate than most of the stories written about Mr. Redstone in gossip columns.”

Real estate billionaire Stephen Ross says the government is taking an anti-business stance these days.

“Business is being painted as the culprit of all our problems and I don’t think that’s it at all,” said Ross when we caught up at his office in Columbus Circle this week.

Ross, owner of pro-football’s Miami Dolphins and founder of real estate giant The Related Companies, says it hasn’t been all bad news in the realm of real estate during the past year: the industry has experienced some improvement since there’s not much over-building happening, allowing several markets to begin experiencing a correction.

Walter Shorenstein, founder of a prominent California real estate firm, adviser to three U.S. presidents and devoted education supporter, died at his home in San Francisco on Thursday of natural causes. He was 95.

Besides founding the eponymous Shorenstein Company, which controls over 30 million square feet of office projects throughout the country, Shorenstein had long been active in civic circles.

Part of his recipe for success, he wrote in San Francisco Chronicle op-ed last year, was trusting his gut instincts and using “street smarts,” or common sense. His instincts served him not only as a businessman but helped him play a pivotal role as a leader in 1993 when he organized the consortium to “Save the Giants” from moving to Florida. They also helped make him an influential figure in the White House, serving as an adviser to Presidents Johnson, Carter and Clinton.

Just heard Carlos Slim Helú at the final panel of the New York Forum. He touched on various topics from hot investment areas to education, regulation and technology innovation.

But the most poignant moment came when CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo asked the richest man in the world if he could start his career today anywhere in the world, where would it be. His response: It would not be in a developed country; it would be in an emerging country. When pressed, he elaborated: either Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, or their Latin American neighbors.

Nobel Prize winner Edmund Phelps, one of the three other panelists, latched on to this response: “There’s been a tremendous loss in dynamism in the U.S. economy,” he said, adding that if Carlos Slim is saying that there are bigger careers made in Chile, etc, than in the U.S. — “it’s not good.”

French Minister of Economic Affairs Christine Lagarde disagreed, saying that there is simply a massive global rebalancing that is taking place.

Later, Slim stepped back for a moment, saying that the U.S. still leads in technology, creativity and innovation, and pointed to companies like Intel and Apple.

When asked about where he sees opportunities as a global investor, aside from being bullish on telecom, Slim said that industries ripe for investment include housing, infrastructure, mining, food, oil, energy, medicine and ones that provide environmental solutions.

– The government’s first job is to promote economic activity. Give people the ability to enjoy life, keep food on plate, roof on head.

– The big problem NY State faces is that its number one industry is finance. Washington has forgotten that the economic engine for the United States is finance. Nothing works without it. Credit derivative swaps don’t sound good, so the government decided to go after the banks. That is potentially very damaging to the country. If you want to create jobs you have to have banks willing to provide loans. You can’t have it both ways.

– The U.S. immigration policy is national suicide: “We educate the best and the brightest and then we don’t give them a green card. We want the best entrepreneurs in the world but won’t let them come here.” (This echoes comments made by Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Speyer last night.)

– When asked by Sulzberger what he sees as potential growth areas for New York, Bloomberg responded that New York City is trying very hard to diversify its economy across all five bureaus. When the financial sector doesn’t do well, however, that dries up everything. But he added that New York City is becoming the IT capital of the world.

– New York’s value proposition is its intellectual property. NYC is never going to be able to compete with Eastern China and Bangladesh where labor cost is very low. That’s something we can’t compete in. NYC is the intellectual capital of the world.

Just got back from the first annual New York Forum hosted in midtown Manhattan, where News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch, Tishman Speyer’s Jerry Speyer, Hearst Magazine’s Cathleen Black and Alcatel-Lucent’s Philippe Camus discussed corporate reinvention on a panel moderated by CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo.

The group discussed everything from the IPad to climate change to government regulations. When it came to the current administration, Murdoch and Speyer were on fire, criticizing President Obama’s leadership skills and policies. Asked if the U.S. is losing its global footing, Murdoch immediately answered: “Absolutely.” continue »

“A total of about 120 lawyers, paralegals and clerks from at least 10 law firms have come and gone after running into conflicts with Mr. Stanford, court records show.”

Evidently tired of all the turnover, the judge recently ordered one of Stanford’s terminated attorneys to stay on the case; the trial is set to take place January of 2011.

Stanford will certainly need a stellar defense team if he ever hopes to get out from behind bars. So far he has been stuck in a Texas prison cell without bail (he is seen as an apparent flight risk), has reportedly dealt with depression and taken beatings from another inmate leading to the loss of vision in an eye.

Indeed, Stanford — whose net worth was estimated at $2.2 billion by FORBES in 2008 — has been reduced to a shell of the knighted financier he once was — a “wreck of a man,” said one of his attorneys.

This legal merry-go-round does not bode well for Stanford.

Of the various billionaires who have had the distinction of spending time in prison or being charged with a crime or under investigation(see “Billionaire Convicts and Inmates”), only one has legally avoided the slammer this past year: Broadcom co-founder Henry T. Nicholas. (See story.)

Since being indicted in 2008, Nicholas, who faced both a civil and a criminal case (21 federal charges of options backdating plus 4 counts of drug conspiracy), has only had a handful of lawyers represent him (not counting attorneys enlisted to deal with his messy divorce).

But in the end, at least officially, it was the US prosecutors that set Nicholas free. On the morning of December 15, in a surprising turn of events, Federal District Judge Cormac Carney told a packed Santa Ana courtroom that the government had “improperly influenced” witnesses and “distorted the truth-finding process” that would allow Nicholas to have a fair trial. After spending millions of dollars and countless hours building up his defense, Nicholas never had to defend himself in court.

But Nicholas was still a wealthy man, worth $1.5 billion in our latest March survey. Stanford’s fortune, much of which may have been exaggerated, is pretty much gone.

The Washington Post announced this week that it’s putting Newsweek up for sale. Now the big question is: who’d want to buy it? The magazine has been losing money since 2007, and the publisher Donald Graham says he expects it will continue to lose money in 2010.

That probably won’t stop some billionaires — the so-called bastions of the business world — from looking and eventually even bidding on the storied news magazine. There is certainly precedence. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for instance, bought up Businessweek last December, making it Bloomberg Businessweek — despite the company reportedly losing somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 million to $70 million in 2009.

Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, owns a piece of The New York Times; earlier this year rumors were flying that he might up his stake for control over the company. Last year, even as The New York Times experienced a 7.7% decline in revenue in 2008, David Geffentold us he had attempted to buy a stake in the company.

Geffen had already tried to buy a stake in a newspaper. In 2007, he took a stab at getting the Los Angeles Times for $2 billion; around the same time Ron Burkle and Eli Broad were making a play for it. Sam Zell wound up being the winner when he bought the paper as part of a wider acquisition of the U.S. media company Tribune. Since then, the company’s spiraled into bankruptcy.

So, who’d be on the short list of billionaires to make a play for Newsweek? If we go with the usual suspects making the prowl over the last few years, it would come down to any of the above. Another contender is Haim Saban who recently told the New Yorker that he’d tried to buy the magazine but it hadn’t been for sale. Now is his chance.

His philanthropic partner and friend, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, sat in for some of the interview and weighed in on the topic of succession planning. According to the two, Buffett may be 80 years old, but he’s “super healthy” and not going anywhere any time soon.

Watch what they said about succession planning:Watch the latest business video at &amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/” mce_href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/”&amp;amp;amp;gt;video.foxbusiness.com&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;

When it came to financial regulations, Gates and Buffett said they are “always a work in progress.” Buffett added that he’s not too worried about what Washington’s up to.
Watch what they had to say about financial reform:Watch the latest business video at &amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/” mce_href=”http://video.foxbusiness.com/”&amp;amp;amp;gt;video.foxbusiness.com&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;